


Large Enough to Hold a Man

by homo_pink



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Imaginary Friends, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 13:00:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homo_pink/pseuds/homo_pink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, Jared remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Large Enough to Hold a Man

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the spnspringfling 2013 exchange on LJ.

Sometimes, if Jared closes his eyes, and makes sure not to squeeze, if he stays loose and receptive and doesn’t push too hard, sometimes he can still picture everything the way it was.

Sometimes, if he drones out the noise at the far end of the city bus at 8 a.m., he might be able to see the swing set in his old backyard. The one that was sort of creaky, and had less pale yellow chipping paint than it did rust. The one that had two swings side by side but never mattered because the second one always stayed empty. The one that nobody ever came to swing with him on because he was too gangly and too quiet and too interested in filling up his reading log and not interested enough in playing kickball. Seven years old and already stuffed into a box labeled Weird.

Back then, Jared couldn’t pronounce his Rs right either, not even the one in his own name, no matter how many times he tried, and that didn’t really lend him any hands.

 

–

 

Sometimes, when he comes to his stop and gets dropped off on 12th Street and has to walk past an old cemetery on his way to work, he might be able to go back in time and see the little green eyed boy telling him not to be afraid of spirits, be brave, they were people once. _It’s okay buddy, they’re quiet too._

Sometimes, when he gets to the library, if he keeps to himself and sorts through the overnight return bin first thing in the morning, if he finds an old battered copy of a Shel Silverstein book, it’s possible he may find it in him to picture one just like it in his tiny hands, picture thumbing through the leafy pages, hesitant and tremblingly shy that first time. 

“I won’t laugh, Jared. I would never laugh. Just try,” Jensen had said, while he sat cross-legged in the grass and listened the whole time, totally rapt, as Jared stumbled his way through a horrible reading of _The Giving Tree_ , so many R words, and Jensen hadn’t laughed at him, not once.

And after, Jensen had told him how brave that was of him and for those few minutes, Jared had felt it. Sometimes Jared remembers that.

 

–

 

Sometimes, if Jared passes through the children’s section to reshelve a cart of books, where there are colorful, happy scenes painted onto the walls with handprints and initials and wildly disproportionate giraffes, and posters tacked up encouraging kids to _make believe_ and _pretend_ and _dream big_ , Jared might stop and let himself look, just for awhile. Just because.

Jared can remember what it’s like to do all of those things. He did them too, before.

Some days, when it’s gloomy, Jared might not look out the window but he might listen to the rain, and he might press his lips together when he thinks about the time he and Jensen hid in his blanket fort while it thundered and crackled outside and he confessed that the first time he experienced it, he’d honestly, innocently, thought that rain was nothing more than a bunch of birds peeing. 

"All at the same time?" Jensen had giggled.

And he might get lost remembering the way he and Jensen rolled around on his bedroom floor in little fits of laughter after that, long enough that he got bits of carpet fiber stuck in his hair. 

Jared had felt silly when he told his bird pee story to Jensen, but not stupid, and he'd liked how it fluttered in his tummy when he made Jensen smile.

 

–

 

Sometimes, if Jared takes a nap, and he doesn't have a fitful sleep, if he falls in easy and light, he might drift off onto another page of his life, one at the very beginning, near the prologue, and he might remember how Jensen would have naptime with him, his feet at Jared's head, Jared's feet curved near Jensen's armpit. And he might remember how once, just before he closed his eyes, Jensen had made a soft promise that somehow, some day, they'd meet in the middle. _We just have to try._

 

–

 

Sometimes, if he passes the computer station and sees one empty, tucked off into the corner, his fingers might strain towards the keyboard, and his feet might follow, and when it's quiet and there aren't many around, he might even be tempted to log onto the internet, and find that missed connections website, maybe. He's heard of people doing that before. If he sits at the chair and stares at the monitor, and he works up his nerve, and he shoves his sleeves up to his elbows and casually looks around to make sure he’s still relatively alone, if he starts to type into the little box, **_JENS_** , if he does all of that and makes it that far, he might just clam up and backspace the whole thing. 

All of four letters, and much too big to fit into Jared’s shrunken world.

So far, he has yet to get past the S.

 

–

 

Sometimes, if he gets up and pushes the chair back where it was, and goes back to his day, it’s only because Jared knows he’s too old for making believe out of things that large. He knows that once you reach a certain age, imaginary friends stop being okay, because your childhood is over and you're not a baby and you don't need them anymore. And Jared knows that once you think it, not too long after, they little by little start going away, for longer periods of time, until one day you’re sixteen years old and you realize you haven’t seen them in years.

Until you’re seventeen and you can hardly believe you made up something so detailed and believed in it for so long.

Until you’re eighteen and start accidentally remembering little things about him, daily. 

Until you’re nineteen and doing it on purpose, and you tell yourself you’re not, but there you are, trying to dream him up all over again. And you wonder what he'd look like today, grown up, if the little dusting of freckles would have faded over time, like the rest of him did.

Until you’re twenty and still spending your Friday nights with your nose in a book, and you've never been kissed, and you start to worry that you might not even like girls, and you let yourself imagine what you’d be doing right then, should Jensen still be around. Would the two of you still build forts and watch Mighty Mouse and make up complex superhero names for each other and would you read out loud again, if he wanted to hear? 

Until you’re twenty-three years old and you want so bad to be as brave as he thought you were but you miss him so much that you’d do anything to bring him back.

Anything. 

Even going so far as to maybe see if anybody by that name actually exists out there, because you’re hopeless and a fool and just as lonely as you were at age seven, and even though he wasn’t real, even though you couldn’t physically touch him, and your mom would get after you for whispering to yourself all the time, he was still the best friend you ever had and sometimes you can’t even breathe without choking on regret, and you wish you’d never been forced to grow up, not if it meant you had to go on without him.

Sometimes, if Jared does any of those things, if he does them everyday, like habit, like ritual, like prayer, nobody else but him knows it, because there’s nobody around to tell, and Jensen’s not around to listen.

 

–

 

Tomorrow, he’ll finish typing out the rest of that name. Tomorrow, he'll be just a little bit braver. He will. Tomorrow. _Just try_.


End file.
